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“Star Trek Online is the best way to boldly go to the final frontier” The Escapist “…one of the largest Trek-things around in terms of scale.” Destructoid “This game is definitely a must play for any Star Trek fan.” Nerd Reactor

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Join the future of the Star Trek Universe in this sci-fi MMORPG exploring the popular worlds from the Star Trek TV shows and movies.

Join Starfleet, the Klingon Empire or the Romulan Republic to explore and adventure in the 25th Century. Visit iconic locations from the TV shows and movies, and fly the starships of the past, present and future. Interact with some of your favorite Star Trek characters, as voiced by the original actors, like Michael Dorn as Worf, Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine, Walter Koenig as Chekov, and over a dozen more actors from all eras.

Be Your Own Captain

Star Trek Online puts you in the captain's chair of your own adventure through more than 125 episodic missions as you discover new species, make new friends, and defend the ideals of the Federation.

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The best Star Trek games

The best Star Trek games you can find in this universe. Set phasers to fun.

Welcome to our list of the best Star Trek games on PC. The dream of exploring space, meeting strange new life and new civilisations; cresting the Final Frontier in the next chapter of humanity’s story; kissing green aliens. All of that. 

Star Trek’s relation to games has always been… shaky. Unlike Star Wars, which had Lucasarts’ hand on the tiller for at least the 1990s, it’s always been a licensed property and not often a successful one. Some studios tried to squeeze Trek into a genre it's not suited for. Others were just cash-grabs, like Star Trek: The Game Show, which relied on the comedic stylings of Q and his lovely female assistant Q to cover a truly soulless trivia contest. Still, companies keep trying, from early test adventures like The Kobayashi Alternative to the crappy game version of the JJ Abrams reboot.

But we’re not interested in those. What are the Trek games that do Gene Roddenberry’s vision proud? Here are our favourites, a collection of games which at least do enough to capture the Star Trek magic, even sometimes despite themselves. 

Star Trek: Judgment Rites

Judgement Rites isn’t the greatest game on this list, but it's arguably the best at putting you into the show. There's an authentic mix of bridge banter and combat and you're doing classic Star Trek tasks, like flying to new worlds and beaming down away teams to sort out their problems. Like its predecessor, 25th Anniversary, it followed the show’s episodic model, pitting Kirk and co against scenarios like Trelane recreating World War I on a distant planet, and a rift in time that promises the end of the Federation within eight days. Unlike 25th, there was also something of a running story involving a mysterious race watching the crew and seeing how they solved these problems, adding a little extra drama to the mix.

Neither the combat nor the adventuring is exactly top-tier, but they made a delicious pairing that was totally in keeping with The Original Series. It’s no wonder that even decades later, many still hold it up as the high point of any crew’s PC adventures. 

Star Trek: Voyager, Elite Force 1 and 2

Elite Force is an rare case where it makes sense to turn Star Trek into a shooter. Voyager is lost in the depths of space, surrounded by enemies, and while risking the senior staff for every casual mission works for television, in reality it’s a pretty dreadful idea. Cue the creation of the Hazard Team, just in time for Voyager to get trapped in a spaceship graveyard full of particularly troublesome trapped alien types.

The first level, set aboard a simulated Borg ship, set a great tone, right down to the Borg not reacting to your presence until triggered. Little expense was spared. The whole crew (including, retroactively, Jeri Ryan) voice their characters, and a real effort made to make the Hazard Team feel like a unit. For a while, it was even suggested that the concept might be added to the show. It wasn’t, though something similar would show up in Enterprise in the form of the MACO assault unit. Best of all, as well as fitting the show surprisingly well, it was a very solid shooter and by far the best action game spin-off. 

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Star Trek: Starfleet Command

There are two basic ways to make a Star Trek game. Either you try and do everything, or you phaser-focus on one particular aspect. Starfleet Command goes all-in on space battles. Forget simply locking phasers and firing photon torpedoes, Starfleet Command is based on the table-top war-game Star Fleet Battles, and a brutal demonstration of just how hard it would be to lead a ship like the Enterprise into battle. Everything your ship has its at your disposal, from weapons to shields to special equipment, in full 3D.

It’s brutally hard, but satisfying with it. Three Starfleet Command games were released, adding proper campaigns and additional races. Later games would offer somewhat similar looking combat, though vastly stripped down to avoid the Command learning curve. Still, if you have what it takes, it’s a challenge that you won’t find elsewhere.   

Okay, this is cheating. EGATrek isn’t an official Star Trek game. However, if you’re of a certain age, it is likely the Trek game that you remember playing first. It’s based on a game called Nettrek, originally the preserve of university servers and the like, and originally simulated the adventures of the Enterprise versus the Klingons and Romulans. After a raised eyebrow and a cough from Paramount, that became the adventures of the Lexington against an invading race called the Mongols. So, totally different!

It’s Star Trek though, right down to the ship design and use of Stardates, and your goal is to travel around and blow up all the Mongols in the system. While not much to look at now, it was definitely fun for the time—and felt a good deal more tactical than it was. It hasn’t aged well, but its place in history means it earns a place here, albeit quietly. 

Star Trek: Borg

Borg is one of the most unusual Star Trek games. It’s an interactive movie, and that’s definitely a knock against it. It’s an interactive movie with style though, and some genuinely smart design. You play a cadet whose father was killed by the Borg. As you flee from another attack from the cyborg singularity, the all-powerful force of smugness Q appears and offers you a deal: go back in time with him, and see if you can save your father from his fate.

The result is genuinely surprising. Unlike the other big Star Trek interactive movie, Klingon, this one benefits from Q capering around and not taking anything even slightly seriously. You even get to kick him in the balls at one point. Star Trek games don’t get much more satisfying than that! It’s so good, the Wiki even lists ‘it is possible to punch Q in the face’ as a gameplay feature.

The true cleverness though is how it handles its time-travel premise. Screw up and Q resets time for you to try again, and quite often that’s required for a puzzle—one in particular involves getting some codes from the Borg Collective. How do you do that? Let yourself be caught, read them while you’re a Borg, and make use of them when Q rewinds time. That’s far too clever for an interactive movie, even if the rest of it—the pace, the acting, the depth—is what you’d expect. 

Star Trek: Bridge Crew

More than any other game, Bridge Crew attempted to create The Dream. It uses VR headsets to put you and your friends on the bridge of a Star Trek vessel. Largely inspired by Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, it works by giving each of you a console and thus controls/information that the other players don’t have, which forces everyone to work together. The captain is in charge, but will only know the engines are about to explode if told. The captain order the phasers fired, but it’s the weapons officer who actually pulls the trigger. Success depends on how well the crew integrates and does their individual jobs.

The main problem with it is that once you’ve done this a couple of times, the lack of depth becomes very apparent. There’s not all that much to actually do, and doing it quickly becomes rote. It doesn’t help that for full effect, you need a whole cadre of friends with expensive VR equipment, which is about as likely as the Enterprise crew not using the holodecks for sex. Still, it’s the game that many fans have been waiting for, and certainly a trip while it lasts. 

Star Trek: Bridge Commander

Bridge Commander is the best of the ‘command chair’ games. It is less brutal than Starfleet Command, but has more depth than the relatively simple shooter action of the adventure games or the Starfleet Academy game, which almost made the list.

The big clever feature is that you don’t control the ship so much as give orders to your individual crew members, making you feel more like a captain than a glorified pilot. You can jump in if necessary, but you’re mostly intended to sit back and trust your navigator to fly and your weapons officer to handle the combat. On top of that, it’s not just a series of quick battles; there is a full narrative campaign to work through. It is even possible to play with voice control, though not advised. When it works, it offers the full Captain experience. Far more often though, you just get blown up while swearing loudly. 

Star Trek The Next Generation: A Final Unity

A Final Unity is a fondly remembered game, though honestly one that’s better fondly remembered than replayed. Creators Spectrum Holobyte clearly set out to make the greatest Star Trek game ever. The game modelled space combat, away team adventure, diplomacy, freeform exploration of the galaxy, and its cleverer features let you you call the entire TNG crew for advice and handpick away teams. In practice, the developers bit off rather more than they could chew, and in trying to replicate TNG’s more serious tone, most of the adventure is honestly sluggish, humourless and slow.

So why’s it here? Primarily because in the moments that it does work, it really captures the TNG spirit, and aesthetically and in terms of story, it’s bang on. It’s just hard not to notice how, for instance, the backgrounds get cheaper and cheaper as the story goes on, or how much of the adventure consists of interminable conversations. Still, it’s easily the best of the TNG-era games, as much as that counts when the competition is the likes of super-primitive shooter Star Trek: Generations or Insurrection tie-in The Hidden Evil. At worst, it’s a game to be admired for what it tried, even if it wasn’t all it could have been. 

Star Trek: Birth of the Federation

That’s right, it’s the almost inevitable Master of Orion game in the Star Trek universe, and honestly I'm being a little generous including it here. Played casually, it’s absolutely fine—a fun game of expansion and discovery and scooping up minor races to be part of your growing empire. Over time though the length of turns renders it almost unplayable. Its main hook was definitely the familiar races, and being able to play with the likes of Klingons instead of just some random warlike species. The effectiveness of this shouldn’t be underestimated, and it’s easily one of the better attempts to paste the Trek universe over an existing game. If not for that though, it’s a pale shadow of not just later games like GalCiv, but prior strategy games from its own developer Microprose. 

Star Trek: Online

The first time I fired up Star Trek Online, I finished the tutorial, got the freedom of the universe, and immediately flew my ship to Deep Space Nine to see what, if anything, the team had done there. I was expecting to be told to come back in an expansion or two, or maybe to see the 3D model. Instead, I arrived, and was able to beam across and run around the set of the best Star Trek show of all time in pretty much all of its glory.

At its best, Star Trek Online is those moments. It continues stories from the TV shows, and even brings actors back to voice their characters. The game mixes space combot with away team action and gives you plenty of freedom to explore and chart your own path through the game. Unfortunately, since going free-to-play, much of the game pivoted around less enjoyable stuff—grinding, the push for new ships, and levelling up. Between those bits there’s still much to enjoy, including building up your crew and engaging in fun action against other players. It’s worth at least trying out, and playing for a while to enjoy the atmosphere and the satisfaction of commanding a ship in MMO space.   

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Star Trek Online Review

• First Released Feb 2, 2010 released

The space combat is short-lived fun, but everything else about this online role-playing game is bland and shallow.

By Kevin VanOrd on February 17, 2010 at 7:09PM PST

Star Trek Online doesn't boldly go where no one's gone before. Instead, it mildly coasts along without much drama or excitement. Developer Cryptic Studios' latest online role-playing game is a "bare minimum" kind of experience, doing just enough to get by, but doing so without an ounce of flair and without the anything-can-happen-in-space buzz that makes the television shows and films such a delight. The game falls into a predictable rut quickly, relying almost solely on spaceship battles for entertainment and falling short almost everywhere else. Luckily, that combat can be fun, and in the best and biggest battles, your screen will light up with phasers and torpedoes, momentarily capturing the thrill of interstellar adventure. Unfortunately, those moments of epic wonder are mostly extinguished by underwhelming cookie-cutter missions, clumsy and unfulfilling ground combat, and shallow exploration that fails to capture the wonder and beauty of deep space. Star Trek Online is light, easy, and shallow, and those may not be qualities you're seeking from your next virtual universe.

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The game may be disappointing, but character creation is a delight. As in Cryptic's previous games (Champions Online, City of Heroes), the toolset is highly flexible. It not only offers a healthy number of races from the Star Trek universe, but it also lets you create your own alien being from scratch. While you run about the game's space stations, you might see relatively normal-looking humans of the Captain Kirk variety, Vulcans sporting the pointiest ears you could hope for, or even odd monstrosities born of the player's creativity. When you first begin, you're stuck with the United Federation of Planets, though after you earn a few levels, you unlock the chance to join the Klingon Empire. If you were hoping to live and die with honor with the Klingons, however, you'll discover that the associated content is bare and unfinished. Missions drop off quickly, and you're stuck with player-versus-player content to fill in the enormous gaps.

And so you'll want to voyage with the Federation. As such, you and most of the players you see will follow more or less the same path to the end game. Not that you'll all coast about in the same ships. After you're done with the initial one-size-fits-all cruiser, you'll narrow your path by choosing a vessel with a more specific function. Cruisers are good for the usual tank role because they can take a heavy beating though they don't do the most damage; escorts are maneuverable and boast a lot of firepower but aren't all that sturdy; and science ships are good for healing, buffing, and other helpful support roles. You don't get nearly as much room to customize your ship's looks as you do with your on-foot avatar (and even less room if you're checking out the Klingon side of things), but the vessels look and feel like authentic Star Trek spacecraft, and you'll enjoy looking at your ship as you fly about on missions or even across the grids that represent deep space. You can even choose a look for your bridge and walk around on it. But it's too bad there's nothing to do there but hang about and wish you could relive all the great stories that Star Trek has served up over the years.

Unfortunately, you need to rely on your imagination to provide tension and interpersonal conflict. A number of different characters send you off on missions, but none of them are memorable, and the writing is as dry as the Yadozi Desert, as well as too often littered with distracting spelling errors. There are some interesting narrative tidbits and fun references to the lore scattered about, but nothing that will sweep you up, in spite of Leonard Nimoy's plaintive and all-too-infrequent voice-overs. (The other bits of voice acting are excruciatingly bad.) Most missions are online RPG standbys: Destroy some Gorn ships, beam someone aboard, and assist a friendly ship in combat. Some are even duller than that: Beam to a planet's surface, press some buttons, and beam back up. Perhaps the quiet moments would be a nice respite if the mission writing conveyed the tension of any given Star Trek away mission. As it is, like much of Star Trek Online, they're just dull.

In a typical play session, you'll navigate space by way of an overworld map on your way from one mission to the next. In Star Trek Online, space is a collection of sectors that are separated by loading screens, and they contain planetary systems that are also separated by loading screens. In addition, players do not all share the same virtual space (as we've seen in other space massively multiplayer online games like Earth & Beyond, EVE Online, and Jumpgate) but are separated by instances, which is a structure that should be familiar to you if you've played a Cryptic game in the past. It's a chopped-up vision of the galaxy that diminishes the mystery of space and the joy of exploration. You will be sent to explore unmapped systems, but all this entails is flying about and scanning anomalies until you reveal one to be a system; entering it initiates yet another poorly written, cookie-cutter caper. Easy to navigate is one thing, but Star Trek Online is divided into simple and digestible chunks. If you are a Trekkie new to online role playing, this spoon-fed design will help ease you into the game, but experienced explorers will miss the rush of discovery.

It's a good thing the space combat is fun in spurts, considering you spend so much of your time steering your ship around. Your shields are represented in the heads-up display by four arcs surrounding your ship; they take individual damage, which is a system not unlike that in other Star Trek games, such as 2002's excellent Bridge Commander. You'll want to protect your hull by keeping your shields up, all while whittling down your enemies' shields and then pounding them with torpedoes and other weapons. Attacks are supplemented by the various skills that you and the crew members earn as you level up, which may replenish shields, enhance damage, or allow for a quick getaway. Moments of true excitement are brief but can deliver an occasional rush. In large-scale fleet actions and player-versus-player shoot-a-thons, your screen will explode with color (and your speakers will explode with the pew-pews of disruptors). This is Star Trek Online at its best. The fun is plain and short lived, but it's rewarding to work with other players to bring down a resilient battle cruiser or a squadron of pesky PVPers.

Most of the action is of a much smaller scale, however. If you stick to missions meant for your level, Star Trek Online is a cakewalk. You can get through most battles by flying circles around enemies while hammering your space bar to fire weapons, and activating abilities from time to time. There are occasions where you'll need to take a bit more care, but even then, you'll need not fear defeat. There is no death penalty whatsoever--you just respawn and reenter the fray, no worse for the wear. The lack of a death penalty may sound appealing if you have dreaded memories of returning to your corpse in EverQuest, but here, it just makes an easy game even easier. Few fights offer the down-to-the-last-second kind of tension you'd hope for, and success is so inevitable that victory often rings hollow. You're just going through the motions without having to exercise the strategies you'd employ in the larger fleet actions.

Ground missions offer the chance to break up any potential tedium, but away team combat is a cobbled together mess. The thing is, some of the ideas applied to planetary combat are actually quite good. You can flank enemies to do extra damage, and the weapons and kits that you equip determine some of the skills you use. Even better, you're accompanied by multiple officers from the crew you've accumulated, and you can equip them with various pieces of armor, shields, and weapons. But these might be the dumbest AI-controlled cohorts you've seen in years. They tumble and jump around for no reason, stand in the middle of fires only to die, or get stuck running in place because they can't figure out how to get around a crate. Your enemies are cut from the same intellectual cloth, so don't expect a challenge--just a chaotic jumble of AI-controlled nitwits shooting at each other while you stand in place tapping number keys. Every so often, you need to use a healing item (you can pet a Tribble for a bit of psychosomatic soothing), but most of the time, fighting on the ground is just as easy as fighting in space. This makes the ability to pause combat for a brief time to organize the chaos a real head scratcher--an intriguing idea that's ultimately pointless considering the total lack of challenge and depth on the ground.

You can, of course, bring a few friends along if the AI's ineptitude gets too frustrating. Should you replace any away team members with a real player, you can expect an even easier time of things, though in space, it can be fun to team up and head to battle en masse. But Star Trek Online isn't an I've-got-your-back kind of game. Here, Cryptic takes another cue from its previous RPGs by making the game easy to play on your own and encouraging ragtag groups to come together only when necessary. You can also join a fleet, which is the game's version of a guild. You need to troll the chat channels for a fleet because there is no built-in fleet search, but there's no shortage of recruiting fleets or recruits at the moment. The tense and not-always-respectful chatter of the main sector chat channels will have you seeking refuge in your own fleet's channel as soon as you join one. Or you may, at least, wish that the game had a specific help channel for players sorting out some of the more convoluted aspects of travel and leveling.

You aren't always fighting or flying from mission to mission. You need to visit a starbase from time to time, whether it be to unload excess inventory or to shop for a new weapon or deflector dish or whatnot. Star Trek Online's economy and inventory management aren't complex, but there are a number of different currencies used in various ways, which is an artificial way of making the game seem more complex than it really is and unnecessarily convoluted. Eventually, you discover that you can buy most decent items for credits at the exchange, which is the game's version of an auction house. However, there are really no auctions, so there is no bidding--just outright sales. Furthermore, the exchange is a pain to use. The meager sorting options don't work properly, so you have to type in very specific search parameters if you want to narrow results down to a workable list. You also spend time on bases customizing your ship, requisitioning new officers, or paging through various skills you can purchase for your officers, which is another process that seems overly convoluted for no apparent reason.

Star Trek Online doesn't always capture the spirit of the franchise, though there are some aspects that do succeed at tapping into a fan's pleasure centers. There's the music of course--the rousing French horn themes that signify the great expanse of deep space. And then there are the clicks and whirrs of scanners and the satisfying, not-quite Majel Barrett drone of your onboard computer. The visuals do their best to keep up, and ships and character designs are detailed enough to make most Trek fans happy. Space is lovely in the way space often is in such games, with the foreground dotted with asteroid fields and glowing nebulas wafting in the distance. When you are out of your ship, the game doesn't look so grand, what with texture pop-in, erratic and sometimes awful animations, and occasional bugs, like disappearing walls.

Those aren't the only glitches you're likely to come across while playing Star Trek Online. Bugs are hardly uncommon in online RPGs during their launch period, though most partially compensate for them with great depth and breadth--attributes this game isn't fortunate enough to possess. One broken large-scale group mission was recently fixed but only partially so; you might still spawn in as an enemy and be targeted (and of course killed) by friendly players. You might try to spend skill points only to receive an error a good portion of the time. We experienced frequent crashes during ground missions on one of our test machines, which is a problem that seems to be affecting ATI video card owners. Tutorial tips continue to pop up, and we've run into quests that couldn't be completed. Clearly, there are some problems here, but most of the issues aren't insurmountable. They're just distracting or annoying.

It isn't bugs that make Star Trek Online feel unfinished, however. It's the inherent shallowness. It's light, airy, and simple--attributes that might attract you at first but only let you down when you find that the game is more boring than bold. Some of the flaws will improve in time; MMOGs are, by their very nature, evolving creatures. Other flaws--the poor ground combat and oddly disconnected nature of the universe--are threaded into the core design and less likely to see improvement. For now, be wary of Star Trek Online. The prospect of epic space combat may seem tempting, but a smattering of entertaining battles are merely oases amongst the monotony. Star Trek Online is a shell, lacking the substance and the style that the franchise so rightfully deserves.

• Leave Blank
• The biggest battles are enjoyable to play
• Flexible character creator makes it fun to create a character and tweak officers
• Soundtrack and sound effects deliver that Star Trek vibe
• Ground combat is a clumsy disaster
• Most battles aren't tense or exciting because they're far too easy
• Shallow, disjointed exploration
• Missions are repetitive and poorly written

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Transformers Gets 40th Anniversary Trading Card Collectibles Starring G1 Autobots & Decepticons

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The year 2024, which marks the 40th anniversary of the Transformers franchise, is starting to wind down. Nevertheless, the robots in disguise aren't about to let the year end without one last celebratory push, and the final party favors include trading cards.

Courtesy of comic book and trading card company Dynamite Entertainment, the Transformers 40th Anniversary Limited Edition Trading Cards Kickstarter is currently rolling out. Featuring Autobots and Decepticons from the Generation 1 era, these cards display epic retro art depicting fans' favorite Transformers. Now live, the Kickstarter also offers a special bonus for those who back it early.

Transformers Rolls Out World's First Permanent Physical Store for 40th Anniversary

The 40th anniversary of the Transformers brand is being capped off with the opening of a new store entirely dedicated to the robots in disguise.

The New Dynamite Transformers Kickstarter Is Already a Massive Success

Launched on Sept. 26, 2024, the Transformers 40th Anniversary Limited Edition Trading Cards Kickstarter is a chance for collectors to show off their fandom. The set includes the Traditional Collector's Series and the Deluxe Ultra-Premium Series, which include Base Cards, Holofoil Cards, Sketch Cards, Signed Cards, Line Art Cards and more. The sketches will be done by Bob Budiansky and Ken Haeser, the former of whom has an extensive history with the Transformers franchise. Once they hit retail, fans can purchase the cards in a variety of ways, from small foil packs to a massive collector's set box. The art on the cards depicts fan-favorite characters such as Optimus Prime , Megatron, Bumblebee, Grimlock, Starscream and more, including more obscure characters such as Bludgeon and Nightbeat. The art styles range from the designs seen on the original toy boxes to the characters' looks in the G1 cartoon and later comic books.

Running for most of the next month, the campaign's goal was to reach $19,840 (a reference to 1984, the year when the Transformers franchise debuted ) in order to be fulfilled. However, it reached this goal in minutes and is currently well over $160,000 with over 600 backers. The campaign has already reached the first stretch goal of $84,000, which ensures that all backers will receive two "Vintage" variant trading cards on claystock paper, with the third and final stretch goal set for $198,000, which the campaign is almost certain to hit by the time it ends on Oct. 25, 2024. There will be several add-ons and extra items for those who fund certain amounts, with the lowest of these ($40) giving backers an uncut sheet of cards. The project is set to ship out to backers in November -- the perfect way to end what's been an amazing year for the Transformers franchise.

Transformers

Transformers  is a media  franchise  produced by American toy company Hasbro and Japanese toy company Takara Tomy. It primarily follows the heroic Autobots and the villainous Decepticons, two alien robot factions at war that can transform into other forms, such as vehicles and animals.

Source: Kickstarter

• merchandise